Folding@Home

[BlackAxe3001]

Not sure if anyone else has heard of Folding@Home or participates in any other distributed computing type projects, but I participate in this one. I think it's something good and that maybe we can start an Org folding at home team.

http://folding.stanford.edu/

The website will describe what Folding@Home is better than I can but basically it is about protein folding and misfolding and how it relates to diseases. I already have a team made, so everyone who wants to join in and not waste any cpu cycles can join me. My team is Team Number: 53690 and I already set it up with Org related info.

Any questions PM me. It's a piece of cake to setup and it runs in low priority mode, so don't worry about it slowing down your computer. Mine runs almost 24/7 on my old desktop and intermittently on my laptop.

EDIT: Here is the org team page http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=53690

[sapi]

:yes:

I'm not running it atm but I used to.

The really interesting thing is that it runs on the ps3

linky (http://games.internode.on.net/content.php?mode=news&id=936) (the formatting in this post isn't great)


...anyway. It's not all doom and gloom for the new console. Their partnership with Folding@Home has been going great guns. To refresh your memory, Folding@Home is software that you can run on your home computer (Windows, Mac or Linux), which connects to the internet and uses the computer's spare cycles to help Stanford University process vast amounts of Alzheimers research data. It was recently announced that the PS3 would also use this technology - and I figured I'd check out what sort of stats were floating about...



Client statistics by OS

OS Type Current TFLOPS* Active CPUs Total CPUs
Windows 152 159303 1625114
Mac OS X/PowerPC 7 8724 95350
Mac OS X/Intel 8 2728 7232
Linux 42 24987 215730
GPU 41 692 2185
PLAYSTATION®3 403 16464 17411
Total 653 212898 1963022



Total number of non-Anonymous donators = 621715
Last updated at Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:58:22 (Pacific Daylight Time - around 9:30am Saturday, Adelaide time)

Yeah, that's right. As of earlier today, it's already reported that more than 17,000 PS3s were running the application (I saw a figure of 13,000 for a mere six hours earlier), already accounting for most of the computing power being used by the project.

This more than meets Stanford professor Vijay Pande's expected goal for the end of one month... in one day. Now it needs around 14,000 more PS3s to participate to make Folding@Home the first distributed computing project to reach a Petaflop. Perspective - RIKEN's supercomputer, the Japanese MDGRAPE-3, uses about a Petaflop of computing power.

So. There are 2 million PS3s in the world already, we should be able to knock over that whole Alzheimer's cure thing in no time.